Well no, BricKy. Hardly down the gurgler.
Our CEO gave a pretty clear indication of the Company's general roadmap for the immediate term in his talk above, and none of it sounded defeatist to me. On the contrary:
1.
So we're going to be driving Quicksilver, but being very tactical in our expenditure.
The current pricing troughs for nickel and cobalt – when coupled with Quicksilver’s emerging status as a premier high-grade, low-cost undeveloped Ni-Co asset – presents a perfect opportunity for investors.
We all read daily, there are a lot of producers now haemorrhaging cash, and we’re seeing supply getting stripped out of the market.
Ultimately, that’s going to lead to a price turn. Indeed, it's looking more and more like a bottoming of the cycle right now.
But it'll take a while. I think the strategy with Quicksilver is to have it close to production-ready for the next sizzle. So it's a massive option on Ni-Co.
What do you do meanwhile to advance the story while garnering your resources?
Well, with all that Study-grade metallurgy under our belt, you'd think we could considerably refine the flowsheet. We know it's basically little more than scrub, screen and gravity, with magnetic separation of the magnetites. But that can all be optimised.
We now have the high-grade cobalt domain within the manganese oxide to specifically address, as well as the high-grade nickel-bearing vermiculite.
And what of leaching processes for the lower-grade stuff?
It also might be particularly interesting and rewarding to research operational methodologies at, for example, the Brazilian Onca and Puma deposits, which bear striking similarities to Quicksilver, and upgrade
most handsomely.
We could also perhaps start touting samples of the magnetite product, which is looking ideal for certain niche markets, to gauge pricing. Maybe even look for tentative offtakes?
2.
We're going to be certainly looking at advancing our other projects:
I know for a fact Damon and Martin were boots on the ground at Yarrambee a couple of weeks back. Don't know what will come of the site visit, but I believe the brothers have been very busy updating databases and undertaking careful reviews of all our tenement holdings.
3.
And then we are going to be looking for more and more things we can bring in to grow Golden Mile as well.As I've said before, this is the area where our CEO really shines:
"...For the people who know me, and for the benefit of those that don’t - the last project that I was involved in re-engineering (and in fact I was lead in re-engineering it) sold last year for US$1.8 Billion. There's a huge opportunity in identification of targets where people have not done the proper work at engineering level, to realise value.
It's not just the one-off. I’ve done multiples of these over the years."
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were several projects under very close scrutiny right now. (Please, in more in-favour commodity areas this time!
)
In the absence of immediate news, particularly in this sort of market, folks sink (or are urged) too easily into despair. They think the worst of managements, hate even strong projects, and imagine no-one's doing anything.
Whereas from my observation, the boys over at Golden Mile are working their butts off on some very good projects, have plenty of fire in their bellies, and a host of great ideas..
I look to other temptations in this market ...but at the present MC (including cash of $1.8M), with the quality of management, and of existing projects - let alone other possible prospects for G88 ...it's NOT easy to be drawn.
